A horrific assassination claims India's most famous son, leaving the nation to ponder a future of growing violence and division

This is the art of darkness: a young woman offers a sandalwood garland, bows from the waist -- and, suddenly, the once and likely future hope of India, a figure invested with the symbolic weight of generations, is obliterated in a deafening roar and a ball of flame. A man whose incandescent family had long been identified with one-sixth of the human race, Rajiv Gandhi last week went the way of his mother Indira, falling to a climate of violence that has steadily overtaken the subcontinent. Rajiv, 46, heir to a miraculous name, disappeared in a fiendish conjurer's trick: amid the...